Information about a driver's driving skill can be used to adapt vehicle control parameters to facilitate the specific driver's needs in terms of vehicle performance and safety. This paper presents an approach to driving skill characterization from a pattern-recognition perspective. The basic idea is to extract patterns that reflect the driver's driving skill level from the measurements of the driver's behavior and the vehicle response. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using a pattern-recognition approach to characterize a driver's handling skill. This paper concludes with the discussions of the challenges and future works to bring the proposed technique to practical use.

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For adult English speaking students of Mandarin, tones pose a very difficult hurdle to pass over. This paper first identifies some sources of difficulties, then classifies and analyzes them. Suggestions to remedy the difficulties have also been made as follows: (1) a new determinancy of the low- dipping contour of the 3rd tone as the norm with other contours as derivations from this norm; (2) new tone drill materials written on music scales, which help the learner to transform from tonemic abstractions to phonetic realities. Tests and experiments have been carried out from 1980 to 1983. The results have confirmed the effectiveness of these suggestions.